'The Legend of Korra' Finale Literally Made Fan Dreams Come True

'The Legend of Korra' Finale Literally Made Fan Dreams Come True

The Legend of Korra on Nickelodeon completed its four season run last night by releasing its final two episodes online at Nick.com. After getting a franchise black eye by swimming too close to then-drowning man M. Night Shamalan for a live action film adaptation of their first animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, creators Bryan konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino returned to their fantasy universe decades after where they left off on Nickelodeon. The new series, Korra, introduced us to the titular female Avatar as a teenager on the brink of learning the last of the world’s four core bending skills.
Since, Avatar Korra has taken down a revolution of non-benders, her spiritual nemesis that posses her Uncle, a roving gang of the world’s most dangerous anarchists and a dictator with global aspirations. It’s been a far cry from a series that introduced “bending” elemental combat as a way of having fighting without physical contact or weapons. Where the original series played more Lord of the Rings for preteens, Korra ended up being about the transition from childhood to adulthood and was made for everybody. Where as the title of the previous series focused on a young boy, the last of the Air Nomads, this one focused on the narrative of our heroine.

via Nickelodeon.

I’ve been covering the Legend of Korra since its premiere in June 2012 on a podcast called Republic City Dispatch which gave me the privilege of monitoring the show and its fandom while recapping each episode and – let me tell you, Korra-curious – last night’s finale literally parallelled fans’ dreams.
Korra had a rough season this year and last as Nickelodeon kept inconsistently scheduling new episodes. The series, originally placed on Saturday Mornings during its first season got re-scheduled to Friday evenings during the second season’s dip in viewership. Episodes from the third season leaked from an company meant to do Spanish translations for the episodes triggered a response from Nickelodeon: Season three was taken off the air entirely and instead seeded to Nick.com in bursts of episodes, culminating in a full on dump of the last two as an internet event.
The fourth season started a mere month after the third ended and although fans were elated for the fourth and final installment, Korra had been hobbled in the ratings game beyond repair. The last few episodes have been released on Nick.com and later aired on television, but the web became the place to be a Korra fan (as a recent poll revealed, it’s the most blogged and re-blogged animated show on Tumblr), so it was last night that I was trolling through the fandom seeing if Nickelodeon managed to keep the wraps on its series finale after two seasons of digital madness. That’s when I found this post:

Captured from Tumblr.com

Already fans had hopes and expectations. And those hopes, bless them, included defending the series well after it’s over. Now that the Korra series finale one-two punch of “The Day of the Colossus” and “The Last Stand” are available for all the world to stream, I found myself circling back to this post – a single fan who accurately predicted the ending of the entire series, not because of plot context clues (there were some, but they were largely inconclusive) but because that’s what she genuinely wanted to see happen. Last night’s finale delivered tons of superbly animated action (thanks to animators at Studio Mir) that brought our favorite character pairings together in a battle for everything that’s good in their modern metropolis. Then, in what for this young lady must have been a mind blowing moment: Avatar Korra takes her female companion’s hand as they step into the Spirit World and out of the series.


The Legend of Korra now exists for the ages as a complete set, tracking Korra from being a cocky teenager with the emotional maturity of a high school freshman to her post-collegiate backpacking vacation with a lover of the same sex. It was incredibly fun, but by increments became incredibly adult. Sometime in the future, the narrative of the show will get all mixed up and the fan-pleading hashtag #Korrassami that represented the finale couple will become one of the hallmarks of this series. This won’t be the worst thing to happen to Korra, but it is overall a reductive view. A series revealing its openly gay Nickelodeon character in the last episode is certainly a way to spike the football when your core fanbase is the melodrama-craving annals of Tumblr, but it’s also the natural conclusion to a show’s fan base who was forced to grow up along with the series.
The Legend of Korra ended up having fights for the kids, adventure for the pre-teens, romances for the teens, history for the young adults and a coming of age story that never gender-restricted its hero. As 52 episodes of television, it will be remembered for all these things. For those of us who stuck with it from the premiere, it literally manifested our dreams.